In this book are depicted and analyzed, in due succession, all the physical sufferings, all the mental tortures a man condemned to death can experience during the hours which immediately precede his execution.

This terribly moving plea was read widely and sympathetically. In a preface to the edition of 1832 the author says: "The author's design in this work, that to which he would call the attention of posterity, is not a special defense, always facile and always transitory, of such-and-such a chosen criminal; it is a general and permanent plea for all the accused, present and future. It is the great cause of human rights drawn up and pleaded in every voice before society. It is the question of life and death, disrobed, denuded, stripped of its high-sounding legal subterfuges, brutally dragged to the light, and placed where people must see it, where it ought to be, and where it really is in its true place, in its own horrible element, not at the tribunal, but upon the scaffold; not with the judge, but with the executioner."